You won't need mind-altering drugs if you own Who Will Cut
Our Hair When We're Gone?, the second album of blissfully cute
freak-pop from Canadian space cadets the Unicorns.

The band's supremely named co-frontmen, Nicholas Diamonds and
Alden Ginger, bonded in high school over music and art.

"Um, Jane's Addiction and Robert Crumb," Ginger says off the top
of his head when pressed for examples. "That just opened up a whole
dialogue that extrapolates from those few things into, I guess,
what we see now.

"I mean, that's, like, the earliest story to do with us. But I
think what's more relevant now is kind of the three of us, the
three-piece. That came together in Montreal. That was in 2003."

The band's final recruit was another groovy young thing born to
be a pop star with a name like J'aime Tambour. All still in their
early to mid-20s, the trio put out their debut album, Unicorns
Are People Too, in March last year. Who Will Cut Our Hair
When We're Gone? followed a mere eight months later, a
dazzlingly colourful affair in both artwork and sound.

Touring has slowed the band's productivity as songwriters, but
not their creativity. It seems the Unicorns can't play what most
would call a "normal" gig. Take a recent show in Asbury Park, New
Jersey.

"We played in this bowling alley and we played in the middle,"
Ginger says. "People bowled around us while we were playing. Yeah,
it was really neat and unconventional."

This may have been inspired by a show at California State
University that led some to believe, for a little while, that the
Unicorns had randomly cut short their set.

"It was kind of an experimental piece where we did some bowling
onstage. While we were suspended in, um, strategic moments of
silence - which is actually a big part of music - we did some
bowling onstage.

"I guess what a lot of people didn't catch was that we were
playing one big long song with a huge breakdown. We brought it back
at the end."

Fans shouldn't expect to hear the songs the way they sound on
the albums, either. At a gig in St Louis they played every song in
a different genre - a reggae version here, a track played in the
style of spooky '60s hit Monster Mash there.

"Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that!" Ginger says. "Yeah, we were
trying to ... I guess, 'mash' things up. That [joke] was
terrible.

"It gets kind of repetitive when you play show after show and
you don't know what to do with your song that you basically know in
and out, so, I dunno, you try and do things like that, y'know?

"I guess we're primarily concerned with our own enjoyment."

Their "enjoyment" on the road conjures a whole new image if you
explore a link on the band's website to a site called "The
Uniporns", where you'll find graphic accounts of the Unicorns in
sexual trysts with each other.

It's supposed to be fiction written by fans, but is there some
truth in there?

"There is truth in ... everything [on the site]," Ginger says.
"After reading that I was, uh, kind of transformed. I don't think I
see my bandmates in the same way. The events have been embellished,
of course, but yeah, there is ... I won't get into that."

Ginger knows who wrote it, but isn't telling.

"I am vowed to silence for the time being. Perhaps in a memoir
later."

Until that time, we're going to have to make do with the
Unicorns's wonderful, idiosyncratic take on pop music.